Fences or Nothing New

I have spent the past three days being officially employed by Flagstaff Medical Center. I spent to sitting all day in orientation and one grueling day serving, well, gruel.
I have alot of personal concerns regarding this recent job choice, mostly with regards to my personal strength and willingness. But one thing i noticed immediately.
I am one of the only Anglos holding this postion. Further more, as far as i can tell, I am the only Anglo my age, who is enrolled in college, at this job. Aside from the pay, which, compared with most jobs available, is generous, I have no actual stake in this job. One of the reasons I stuck with my equally grueling food service job for so long was because it infalted my ego.

Almost the entire staff I work with is Navajo, ranging from girls around my age to woman in their sixties.

A confession: When I am in a new situation and I see a Navajo I have a tendency to want to really really really talk to that person. I feel this instant kinship and draw.
I watched two of my new coworkers put fruit in a blender today to make sorbet or a smoothie, and they were chattering and talking with that Navajo repor and I really wanted to join them.

In my interview, my boss made the comment that I would probably never be boring because I had "grown up on the Rez."

I have never felt more invisible then today. Perhaps, this is because the hospital is a huge business with who knows how many employees. Perhaps it is because I am once again doing a completely diserable job, cleaning up undisireable objects, only this time I don't have the advantage of being related to fine dining. I found that very few people made eye contact with me today. In and out of the kitchen.

More frustrating then the distance I felt from many of the hospital employees was the distance I felt from the staff. Like with the pair blendling fruit, I wanted, very badly to shout "Hey, hey! I grew up on the Rez.!"

I often feel that when this little tidbit is disclosed then I instantly earn a little, well, street cred. In both cultures.

This raises a few questions:

Do I use being from the Rez? To I use it to gain equality with a Navajo coworker? To stick out from a Anglo crowd?

In Orientation we actually had to hear the hospital interpreter speak on the cultural sensitivity with regard to Navajo patients. I am not sure what I can or cannot disclose, due to confidentionality, but I will say that I the audience was very sensitive, very curious, and for the most part, entirely uninformed. Some questions I heard:

"Do I shake ALL their hands? Sould I not shake the men's hands if it's a matriarical society?"

"Why don't they like eye contact?"

"Can you say that 'yah-ta-hay' word again?"

I'm not sure where all this is going, but, I still felt a distance between employees, and, as if this was new, I was again agog at the lack of information about the tribe in Anglo culture.

Scrambled

Sifting through the war zone of my hard drive trying to find my HURA proposal.

Found my timeline, and I am on schedule.

Gorgeous recording equipent on the way. I ordered a remarkable device that allows me to record phone conversations. Behold, I am Dick Cheny.

Fodder:

Hiked today and saw a few horned toads today. The word for horned toad in navajo is the same word for grandfather. All of my friends referred to the horned toad as their grandfather.

The night my parent marriage officially distingrated I kept a horned toad in a red and purple satin pouch. I carried that reptile around for twenty-four hours, by the light of the flashing police sirens and the closet where I hid. I slept to the repile on someone else's sofa because my mother wouldn't let me be at home. I stayed in a sticky trailer.

The little toad died shortly before my mother came over and I walked down the steps to that trailer and asked her if there was going to be a divorce.

His little brown body shrivled up inside that soft little bag.

I see potential.

P/S I need to find a really good navajo-to-english dictionary.

First Posting

Finally got the blog up and running. This week has been plagued with logisical failures, big and small, personal and whatever is the opposite of that.

Failures of Importance:
Payroll for this project
My laptop is dead. (I have been doing work at Klein)
The internet at my apartment is down as my older sister neglected to pay our cable bill for two months.

Basically, my essays and stories in transit are, as of now, stranded on my uncharged laptop. I am wondering if it would be possible to order a new charging cord using the HURA Funding, or if that would be ill advised.

Met with Beverly Cleland at the English Department about an hour ago in order to order equipment. I'll hopefully be putting an order for a voice recorder of some kind. To digital or not to digital?

Otherwise, I am pleased with the formatting of this blog thus far. The Newsreel is particualr snazzy. It should be noted that the picture that is heading this blog was found on a website that featured photogrpahs of global poverty. I believe the picture was taken somewhere out near Mounument Valley.

I will try to update this a couple times a day, if only to keep myself up to date. I'll add some relevant links this afternoon.